Mark Kingston explains decision to pitch Jake McCoy vs. ETSU

South Carolina freshman lefty pitcher Jake McCoy made his first career start in a 15-2 win over East Tennessee State on Wednesday in seven innings. And after coming out of the bullpen to start the season, head coach Mark Kingston explained the reason for McCoy getting the nod in a midweek game.

The simple answer is that McCoy possesses some rare talent. A lefty that can reach the mid-90s with his fastball, Kingston wanted to see what the freshman could do in a start.

“And the reason we pitched Jake is because Jake is an extremely talented freshman,” Kingston said postgame. “Not many lefty freshmen in the country that throw up to 96 miles per hour. He’s gotten progressively better. And we just thought he deserved the opportunity.”

And though McCoy did give up the two runs that ETSU managed to score, Kingston took the blame for that.

“I think it’s my fault he gave up the two runs in that first inning,” Kingston said. “We pitched to the righty that was hitting over .500 on the year against lefties with a guy on deck that probably would’ve been a better matchup and if we had done that, he might’ve not given up any runs in that inning. So I thought Jake handled himself pretty well today.”

All told, it was a brief outing for McCoy, who pitched just a pair of innings but got the win, his first of his career.

After McCoy, Kingston went with a quintet of pitchers out of the bullpen — Tyler Dean, Chris Veach, Connor McCreery, Drake Quinn and Garrett Gainey — giving each an inning of work. McCoy had given up a pair of hits in his two innings of work, but the relief crew limited ETSU to just one hit and four total baserunners in the final five innings of the game.

And with just two runs surrendered and a dominant win before a weekend series, Kingston was pretty pleased with the plan going off as expected.

“We knew the guys coming in the game out of the bullpen, we were going to try to get one inning out of each of them,” Kingston said. “And you’ve gotta get these guys in a rhythm. We played Wednesday this week so it’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So we wanted to get them on smaller pitch counts but also get them back into good rhythm, get some confidence.”